Saturday, February 07, 2015

Just another Leftist psychopathic liar

Remember Bill Clinton claiming that Hillary was named after Sir Edmund? Problem: Edmund Hillary was just a New Zealand sheep farmer at the time she was born. Climbing Everest came years later. A typical psychopathic lie

Longtime residents of French Quarter say the NBC News anchor’s vivid claims about Katrina since the August 2005 hurricane have been overblown.

Williams’ past reporting has come under new scrutiny after revelations earlier this week that he had peddled a false story about what he described as a near-death experience in which a US army helicopter he was riding in in Iraq in 2003 came under RPG and AK-47 fire. The story was exposed by US soldiers as false. Williams called it a “mistake” and apologized.

Longtime residents of New Orleans’ French Quarter say they believe Williams’ vivid claims about his Katrina reporting in the years since the devastating August 2005 storm have also been overblown. They shake their heads at Williams’ having said that he saw a body floating face-down outside his hotel. They say it is highly unlikely that Williams’ hotel was “overrun with gangs”, as the anchor has said. They say there was no dysentery, a disease Williams has said that he caught while he was in the city reporting, and that bottled water was plentiful in the area – despite Williams’ claims to the contrary.

“I saw one of his tapes last night. He said he was told not to drink bottled water in front of people because people would kill you for it?” said Dr Brobson Lutz, a former director of the New Orleans city health department who is a longtime resident of the French Quarter and who ran an EMS station there after the storm. “That’s absolutely hogwash.”

There’s an emerging consensus among some political gabbers that Brian Williams’ long-running misrepresentations about his time in Iraq does serious damage to a major national figure.

The twist: The figure being skewered is not the embattled NBC anchorman but Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Why would misstatements by Williams — that a helicopter he rode in a dozen years ago in Iraq came under enemy fire — damage the once and likely future presidential candidate?

Because the former secretary of state and frontrunner-in-waiting for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination had her own Williams-esque flight of war-zone “misspeak.”

Clinton’s error came in the thick of her 2008 run for the presidency, when she claimed in a speech that she and her party once ducked sniper fire on an airport tarmac in Bosnia. It wasn’t true.

The NBC anchor’s career-threatening failure on the Iraq story now has commentators, particularly on the political right, saying Clinton should be in just as much trouble.

At least one seasoned hand in Clintonworld theorizes, though, that Hillary’s 2008 campaign trail plotz will not ultimately be as damaging as Williams’ meltdown. Here’s why: Williams has told the tale of the attack on a U.S. military helicopter many times over the years since he embedded with the Army during the 2003 Iraqi invasion. His problem is that he has expanded and embellished the alleged brush with danger many times.

According to reporting led by the military journal Stars & Stripes, aviators on the scene at the time said the copter carrying Williams was an hour behind another Chinook forced to land, after being hit by a rocket-propelled grenade.

In multiple retellings over the years, though, the NBC anchor has gone from saying he was “on the ground” when he learned about the RPG threat to suggesting the copter immediately in front of his took the hit to saying his own chopper was battered by both the RPG and AK-47 fire.

Williams told Stars & Stripes he “misremembered” the incident and that he doesn’t “know what screwed up in my mind that caused me to conflate one aircraft with another.” An on-air apology Wednesday night has done little to quell the furor.

Flashing back a couple of campaign seasons, NBC News was among the outlets that hit hardest when Hillary Clinton got her own war story wrong. Though Williams was on the periphery of that reporting, his network reported Clinton’s flub and how it took her a week to correct it.

When first learning of Williams’ own veracity problem this week, one former Clinton aide said he was “chagrined,” thinking, “This will bring back something from that campaign, and those parallels will be drawn as if what she did was exactly like what Brian Williams did.”

Clinton had said during a March 2008 speech that, while visiting Bosnia in 1996 as first lady, she remembered “landing under sniper fire.” A greeting ceremony had to be cancelled, she said, as her party “ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base.”

Videotape instead showed Clinton, her daughter Chelsea and their entourage simply striding across a tarmac with smiles and greeting a retinue of well-wishers.

1 comment:

My wife and I honey mooned in New Orleans in April 2005, and stayed at the home of a good friend who lived in the French Quarter, off Dumaine street. Our friend spared us the 'tourist traps' and treated us to the best local delights frequented by locals. We were very grateful for those delights.

When Katrina arrived, our friend and daughter left the area for higher ground in Shreveport until the storm subsided. Four days later, our friend and daughter arrived back home at Dumaine street, and even though the Mississippi river levee was 2 blocks from their home, there was little evidence of flooding and water damage in much of the French Quarter.

I think the accusation of Brian Williams 'embellishing' his 'floating body' story is credible.